Ivy Fae @ivyfae@friend.camp

yay played a 90 minute set of original music, didn’t get paid, everyone thought I was a dj 🤨

@starlit hi I’m over here does that count?

@casey thanks 😁

I’m finally feeling better, so now here’s the story of my trip to Diana Initiative and how I broke into DEFCON

Diana Initiative was *fantastic*. Cool sweet folks everywhere. Good talks, cool CTF, and great lockpick village. Learned PCB design, social engineering, web app hacking. I also ended up being one of just 3 people to open all the lockpicking ctf challenges. It was super fun.

Day 2 I accidentally slept in VERY LATE. Like 4PM. I’d set two alarms and I still don’t know how that happened

Oops had to redraft and now they’re backwards. 😖

I found a corner in this karaoke party to just observe how these things worked. I leaned on the wall to rest, and I felt it give. It was one of those conference hall configurable walls. I leaned harder and it opened just about a foot. I squeezed through and found myself in a room full of stacked chairs.

The room had an exit to a hallway. “Welcome to Warp Zone”

I walked in the back door of the party and texted my friend, “I’m inside”. It had been three minutes. 😂

The party was sooo good and it meant a lot to me to be able to participate. I felt pretty proud of myself as well.
I also made a fake badge out of literal trash using the nail scissors I’d gotten as swag fro Diana Initiative. It worked though! A couple guys walked up to me very purposefully and asked me which badge LED color I had and tried to bump badges with me in the party. I thought I was caught so I just said “uh, it’s fake” and braced to be hauled out.

They just started laughing and shook my hand. I didn’t realize until later that one of them was hitting on me. But I didn’t see them again so wev.

A friend I met at this party challenged me, after I said I wanted to be a red teamer, to try to attend a DEFCON talk the next day. He was super encouraging.

I had two hours to kill before my flight, so I got up, got dressed, pinned on my trash badge, and walked right in.

Then realized I was in the wrong track, left, and walked past goon squad 2.

So I got to learn about writing poetry that doubles as shellcode and how to hack micro controllers! Super fun.

Here’s my trash badge. The real ones looked like they were made of quartz.

I’m gonna go legit next year but it felt pretty great to do my first defcon the way I did.

I hope this was an entertaining story for anyone who read it all. 😁

I was feeling really down for missing most of day 2 of 2.

A friend told me about a party they were going to at DEFCON and offered to sneak me in. I wanted to make up for my missed experience, so I was excited.

I went to the party and watched the goons checking badges at the door. My friend texted right then and said they were going to be pretty late. Trying to not look suspicious, I entered an adjacent public party to wait.

She came at me with this whole “feeling hurt/angry/sad is a choice” thing and I was trying to explain how invalidating that is.

How can someone on one hand advocate not calling people resources bc they’re human beings and on the other completely deny that ppl have emotions?

DBT saved my life. I have strong feelings about validation. When I heard her teaching a room of my peers that it’s good to invalidate people’s feelings, I guess I snapped. It’s just gross

Anyway I was feeling super vulnerable. After that the agile coach (3rd party very opinionated consultant) came in and someone vaguely mentioned an emotion. Her response was “there’s no crying in scrum”. She’d been saying things like that all day.

Im not proud of it, but I’m not sorry either: I fucking popped off on her. If you don’t know me, this is very unusual for me. My expression of anger is to become quieter and more deliberate with my words.

Had an agile coach in to facilitate training and a department-wide retro. The CEO and some user employees were also there. (I’m a CSM)

It was fuckin ROUGH. Several of our POs cried secretly, a few others too Xanax during the thing. I also left and cried in the bathroom bc I felt so under attack. It was bad enough that a PO pulled me aside to ask me how i even want to get out of bed in the morning. “I don’t.” was my response.